An incredible story came out of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing. A schoolteacher named Arai was standing by the classroom window, looking at the children playing outside. She held up to the sunlight a sheet of white rice paper with her name, in calligraphy, delicately brushed across the page in black India ink by gifted little fingers. One of her students had done it.
Then the atom bomb exploded, and the teacher fell to the floor. When she arose, she still clutched the paper that she had been holding before her face. The black Japanese characters had, however, absorbed the light and, instantly, burned away. Only the white paper, which had reflected the light, remained intact.
The light, though, that had burned through the black letters burrowed into her skin.
What that meant was in the delicate handwriting of a child now gone, the name “Arai,” seared in flesh, was stenciled across her face as scars.
What an amazing object lesson for “the great controversy.” For those who believe not only in the Bible, but the Bible teaching of a “great controversy” between a literal Christ and a literal Satan, between pure good and pure evil, between light and darkness -- this story of Arai’s scars is one that reveals the radical difference between good and evil, light and darkness.
And just as Arai decided not to have surgery to remove the scars, but wanted to keep them as a reminder, we know, too, that Jesus will forever bear the scars of the cross, an eternal testimony to what our redemption, in this world of evil, cost the Son of God. “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah 3:16).
